Stanley Tomshinsky Biography
Stanley Tomshinsky was born in New York in 1935, the only child of a Jewish father and mother of Latvian origin, who emigrated to America in the 1920s. After graduating in journalism, attracted like most American intellectuals by European culture and curious to discover and share the contemporary climate of the artistic avant-garde within existentialism lived as an experience, he moved to Europe, choosing Paris as his destination, where he began his career. artistic adventure as a sculptor. In a small shop on Rue de Seine in Paris he purchased his first packet of synthetic clay, but copper, iron and welding were the means through which he gave life to thread-like, abstract and 'surreal' sculptures. Totems, figures, mythological creatures become the symbolic expression of the themes dear to Tomshinsky's philosophical and spiritual research: God, man and the universe. In those years he courageously faced the language of sculpture understood as an open form proposed at the end of the 1920s by the Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzales and further developed by the American Alexander Calder with mobile sculptures. Already in the sculpture of that period he reveals a completely personal figure, characterized by geometric structures crossed by soft and flowing filaments which, upon careful reading, take us into flows of cosmic energy: the Far East with Buddhist spirituality and Zen, which Tomshinsky organizes with skilful clarity. A conceptual and stylistic approach that he himself defines as based on "symbolic abstraction".
